In July, Dr. Melinda Negrón-Gonzales will officially make the jump from Manchester to Durham and join the faculty at the Carsey School of Public Policy. The 30-mile move may not seem all that momentous after a career that has taken Dr. Negrón-Gonzales from her hometown of Queens, New York, to New Hampshire’s Queen City, with a few stops around the world in between. However, the College of Professional Studies (CPS) in Manchester has been her home for the past fifteen years and she has fallen hard for that corner of the UNH community. Dr. Negrón-Gonzales reflected on her career path and her new roles at Carsey during the final weeks of her last semester there.
“I’m just amazed by the students in Manchester,” she says with evident warmth. “[My students] manage to juggle a lot of different commitments: work and school and family life… They’re incredibly bright. They feed my soul.”
“The transition to Carsey couldn’t have come at a better time, as an ever-greater number of students have expressed an interest in studying how to address issues with worldwide effects.”?
In addition to her position as an associate professor of political science and department chair of security studies at CPS, Dr. Negrón-Gonzales is now a faculty fellow at the Carsey School. Through her joint appointment, she also will oversee UNH’s master’s program in Global Conflict and Human Security at Carsey, which Dr. Negrón-Gonzales helped launch in Manchester in 2021. The transition to Carsey couldn’t have come at a better time, as an ever-greater number of students have expressed an interest in studying how to address issues with worldwide effects.?
“International relations, global studies, humanitarian assistance are things that a lot of students have an interest in, especially as there are more and more conflicts erupting or recurring in the global south in particular,” she says. “That used to be an area that we didn't have covered at the College [of Professional Studies]… That's where the idea came from to create a professional master's program.”
Dr. Negrón-Gonzales had been contemplating this kind of graduate degree for a few years, when she got word that Carsey was testing similar waters. She worked with Dan Bromberg—who was Director of Academic Programs at the time—on studying the curricular overlap between their ideas and potentially collaborating on specific classes. It wasn’t long before Dr. Bromberg suggested a more permanent arrangement.?
“It was a really good partnership that only lasted like a year and a half before Dan proposed that I just bring the whole program over to Carsey!”
The Global Conflict and Human Security degree will have its inaugural Carsey classes this fall, but Dr. Negrón-Gonzales’s interest in global issues can be traced not just back to her graduate and undergraduate studies, but to her elementary school days in New York. Dr. Negrón-Gonzales recalls the day her fifth grade teacher spoke passionately about USA for Africa, an organization of American artists raising money to help fight a multi-year famine in Ethiopia. The group, led by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, is best remembered today for their 1985 song “We Are the World” and the cross-country benefit event they held the next year: Hands Across America. Her teacher leveraged all the excitement into a project where students organized their own fundraiser on behalf of the global poor. For a young Melinda, the idea that her individual actions could make a difference in the world made a lasting impact.?
“This was a very diverse group of kids in Hollis, Queens. And that’s really when I started to look out into the world,” she says, recalling how she threw herself into the project: wearing the t-shirts and singing along to the songs. “That’s where my interest grew in global affairs.”
She connects that first experience of thinking on an international level directly to her undergraduate days at the University of Florida, where Dr. Negrón-Gonzales studied anthropology. It was there that she further developed her interest in the people and politics of Africa as well as the Middle East.?
After earning her BA, Dr. Negrón-Gonzales worked for a few years as a bank teller before becoming the coordinator at a non-profit hospice organization. The work resonated so deeply that she soon began volunteering her weekends there as well and found her interest in activism rekindled. The charity’s leader was one of the country’s foremost advocates for palliative care and helped to push the medical field to focus on the emotional wellbeing of patients at the end of their lives. Dr. Negrón-Gonzales was struck by the extraordinary impact that “one person with a vision” could achieve. When she decided to return to the University of Florida for graduate school, she merged her interests in world affairs and political advocacy.
“Doing volunteer work, it got me thinking about civil society: how everyday people can do things in the world,” she says about the years leading up to her PhD.”
“Doing volunteer work, it got me thinking about civil society: how everyday people can do things in the world,” she says about the years leading up to her PhD. “I made the switch from anthropology to political science because I was really interested in understanding how everyday people pushed their governments.”
Dr. Negrón-Gonzales enrolled in grad school with the goal of examining how citizens respond to large-scale disputes. Her coursework began in the fall of 2001, which proved to be a crucial time to study international conflicts. Despite being a brand new student whose academic focus was more on civil wars and social movements, the school informed her she would have to teach a class on terrorism. Amidst the heightened political environment and additional teaching work, she completed first her master’s in international studies and then officially became Doctor Negrón-Gonzales by earning her doctorate in political science in 2009. Her dissertation looked into human rights activism in Turkey, where she also conducted field research as part of a Fulbright Scholarship.?
In the fifteen years that she has been teaching at UNH, Dr. Negrón-Gonzales has continued her work on the different groups advocating for human rights in the Middle East broadly, but often with an eye toward Turkey. Recent research has looked into how “counterterrorism” efforts can function as suppression tactics against political enemies, a subject on which she published an article in Turkish Studies in 2021. In the years since her own graduate studies, Turkey has experienced a major ebb in its citizens’ freedoms, especially for journalists and dissidents. However, Dr. Negrón-Gonzales maintains a belief in the people behind the movements fighting for basic rights.
“You see these everyday heroes that totally go unnoticed… who try to raise awareness, who are totally jeopardizing, not just their career, but their lives,” she says of the reporters, lawyers, and human rights activists she has met in Turkey. “I'm amazed by their resilience.”
“You see these everyday heroes that totally go unnoticed… who try to raise awareness, who are totally jeopardizing, not just their career, but their lives,” she says of the reporters, lawyers, and human rights activists she has met in Turkey. “I'm amazed by their resilience.”
It is her keen interest in the people fighting for change on the front lines that makes Dr. Negrón-Gonzales such an exciting addition to the Carsey community. She aims to take the research she does on the individual level, where laws and regulations are felt, and incorporate it into research done on the public policy level, where they are decided. She believes that good policy cannot just be top-down: it starts with the people affected by that policy voicing their concerns and advocating for change. Dr. Negrón-Gonzales hopes that the collaborative research she will do at Carsey can help both social movements to push more effectively for policy changes and help decision-makers to design better policies in response.?
“The global conflict program is really going to be a good fit [at] Carsey… I get to be in this wonderful scholarly community of people who are thinking about public service and civil society,” she says. “That’s what’s so exciting about the work that people at Carsey do: it’s policy-oriented, and policy can have a real, moral impact! That’s pretty cool.”
Reported by Benjamin Scott Savard ‘23G
